ON THE VAGARIES OF NATURE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 30th, 2005


It's so nice to see so many of you back in church this morning, after last weekend's amazing snowstorm. And for those of you who weren't here last Sunday (which is basically all of you), we had a pretty amazing time. Like Woody, I was trained to believe that "the church never closes" -- that no matter how bad the weather may be, someone (by which is generally meant the minister) should always be here to open the doors and turn on the lights and feed the flock on Sunday morning. But after this last round of blizzards, I've also come to see the wisdom of the other side of the question, which is that "church will always be here" too -- and if the weather is so severe that you feel like you're taking your life in your hands to venture out, please don't...because we'll still be here the following week, and the week after that and the week after that.

As some of you know, I was actually scheduled to exchange pulpits last weekend with my colleague Jennifer Brooks, who is now the settled minister on Nantucket. This is something we'd been talking about for a long time, and planning for about a month, mostly so that Jennifer could have a Sunday off without having to worry about writing a new sermon; but on Saturday morning we both looked at the forecast and decided not to press our luck, not because we were worried about making the journey, but because neither of us were sure that we would be able to get back, or even whether there would be a congregation for the other to preach to when we each got to where we were going. And in retrospect that turned out to be a wise decision (and neither of us had to worry about preparing a sermon anyway). But it's not always easy to find someone to cover for you when you live on an island and need a Sunday off, and having lived on Nantucket myself for two years, I understand what that's about. In many ways, it's these small collegial courtesies that bind us together as a religious movement: as much as our denominational structures, as much as our shared values and beliefs, as much as our common history, it's the little things like watching out for one another and helping out in times of need that create a faith community. Mutual Care, Consultation, Admonition, Participation, Recommendation and Relief: these are the "six ways of Communion" described in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which is the historical document on which our own congregational polity is (I suppose I should say) penultimately based -- since ultimately the Platform itself looks back to Scripture for its basic principles. But pulpit exchanges fulfill four of the six (Care, Consultation, Participation and Relief), and potentially touch on the other two (Admonition and Recommendation) as well.

Here in Carlisle, we had a much easier time of it than they did on Nantucket. The scripture says "wherever two or three are gathered," so with half-a-dozen we actually had souls to spare. Myself and Molly, Bryan and the twins, and Tom Lockwood (who had signed up to be the greeter)...so except for the choir (which was scheduled to perform in Lexington last Sunday anyway), we were fully staffed and ready to go...(except that I was going to have to lead the singing!) We shoveled out a path to the front door, then came inside and put the kettle on. I preached a brief sermon of one sentence: "Thank you all for coming out and God bless us every one" (basically, the same sermon I preach every week, only with fewer illustrations); then we cut up the coffee cake that my housekeeper Joanne had baked for the visiting minister, and settled in for a great conversation about old movies, and EMT training, and (of course) the Welcoming Congregation, which I want you to know we got all worked out in about ten minutes, with the twins and I mostly listening.

I won't try to recreate that conversation, since one of the things I've learned over the years is that often times the process of having the conversation itself is just as significant as the outcome. But I do want to remind people that, when all is said and done, that the process of becoming a Welcoming Congregation is NOT about how any of us individually may feel personally about what other people may or may not do with one another privately; it's about how we, as a community, can best affirm publicly our shared belief in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." It's about how do we practice what we preach, which I know (as a preacher myself) is not always the easiest thing to do.

But I'm optimistic, and I'll tell you why. It's because I believe that despite all the various opinions I've heard expressed on the subject over the last several months, our hearts are basically in the right place on this issue. I suspect that all of us know people who are gay (and nowadays most of us even know that we know them) -- friends or colleagues or family members -- and I simply can't imagine that any one of us would want our own loved ones NOT to feel welcome in this church. It's simply unimaginable. So it's really not so much the goal, as it is the best path to the goal, that is the topic of conversation. And I also know that there are some people who prefer a broad and general statement like "All Are Welcome Here," and others who feel that we need a more precise and specific statement of welcome at this particular moment in history. And this is a little trickier. As a writer, for example, I've been taught to prefer precision over vagueness, yet I also can appreciate the evocative power of a strong, universal declaration. What I don't understand is why it has to be one or the other, and why we can't have one of each.

Let's face it, statements like this are a dime a dozen. And as I'm sure you've heard me say many times before (and will doubtlessly hear me say many times again): the one great advantage of talk being cheap is that we can afford to do a lot of it. And if we talk politely and use our indoor voices, the only price we really pay is the opportunity cost of not moving forward as quickly as we may like, which will hopefully be recovered through less friction and fewer wrong turns down the road. Finding just the right balance between action and deliberation is never easy; and at some point we do indeed have to move forward, hopefully all together and in the same direction. But in the meantime, we need to weigh the difficulties of having this conversation against the consequence of failing to have it, which are potentially quite profound indeed.

But that's not really what I want to talk about here this morning. What I really want to tell you about is another pulpit exchange that took place right here in Massachusetts over 175 years ago. At one AM on the morning of Saturday May 31st, 1828, the Reverend Henry Ware Jr., age 35, one of the principal organizers of the American Unitarian Association and minister of Boston's historic Second Church located on Hanover Street in the North End, departed the city by stagecoach bound for Northampton, (which was at the time Unitarianism's western-most outpost), in order to fulfill a preaching engagement he had made there with the minister of that newly-organized Unitarian congregation, his brother-in-law the Reverend Edward Brooks Hall. It was (naturally) a dark and stormy night, and at some point in his journey Ware became exposed to the elements. He arrived in Northampton late Saturday evening both greatly fatigued and soaked to the bone, and suffering from a persistent cough and difficult breathing. After passing "a very uncomfortable night," and "notwithstanding the continuance of these symptoms," Ware "went into the pulpit" the next day and preached both the morning and the afternoon services. Still no better the following morning, Ware ignored the advice of those around him (who encouraged him to remain in Northampton and rest) and resolved instead to return to Boston. He took some medicine (probably some form of narcotic), and set out for home, traveling by horseback in the company of a friend. They made it about 25 miles before they were obliged to stop for the night. At this point Ware's "powers of endurance had been taxed to the utmost, and he went to bed completely exhausted, with every indication of an approaching fever." On Tuesday morning he reluctantly agreed to summon the local physician, who diagnosed "severe inflammation of the lungs" and prescribed both bleeding and other "active treatment" (I hate to think what that might have been) which soon reduced the patient "to a state of extreme prostration."

In the meantime, Ware's companion had continued on to Boston in order to inform both his family and the church of Henry's illness. Henry's wife Mary, then seven months pregnant, set out immediately to join her husband, while the members of the Standing Committee made arrangements to hire one of Ware's young protégés, the 25-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson, to fill the pulpit at Second Church until their minister should recover his health, at a salary of $15 per Sunday. But Ware never really did recover his health, so the following spring the Proprietors of the Second Church in Boston did what any responsible religious society would have done in those days: they voted to hire Emerson as Ware's permanent assistant, and then, in the hope that fresh air, good food, and the Italian sunshine would do for their minister's health what a summer in Worcester and a winter in Brookline could not, raised an additional $1000 in order to send Henry and Mary on what turned out to be an 17 month long European tour.

When the Wares finally returned to Boston in the summer of 1830, Henry formally resigned his position at Second Church in order to assume new duties as the Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care at Harvard, a position that had been created specifically for him in his absence. The following spring he published a thin devotional manual titled "On the Formation of the Christian Character," in which he described the purpose of the religious life as "giving your heart a permanent bias toward God." Written during his recuperation in Europe, and a best-seller in its day, The Formation of Christian Character went through 15 different editions, and was popular among both Unitarians and more traditional Christians alike. Even Henry David Thoreau owned a copy (and we know how he felt about buying what he could just as easily borrow).

Emerson likewise was intimately familiar with the contents of Ware's little book, and the two men continued to remain friends throughout their lifetimes, despite the eventual divergence of their ideas. Emerson was apparently never really that comfortable in his ministry at Second Church. An eloquent preacher but an ambivalent pastor, and the orphaned son of a minister who had grown up in his grandfather's parsonage just down the road from here in Concord, Emerson felt both forced into the ministry by the weight of family tradition and yet constrained by the limitations of the profession as well. He eventually resigned his position at Second Church in 1832, ostensibly over a disagreement with the Standing Committee about whether or not to continue to celebrate the Lords Supper, but in reality in order to be free to travel to Europe himself, and to begin a new career as an author and lecturer.

Emerson's first book, Nature, was published in 1836, and in many ways mirrors the same devotionalist perspective of Ware's little volume in its concern for ethics and practical morality, while at the same time representing a much more spiritual -- even mystical -- attitude toward God and the Natural World than Ware would have been comfortable with. Two years later, when Professor Ware's students at Harvard invited Mr. Emerson to address their graduating class on a refulgent summer evening in the chapel at Divinity Hall, the subsequent controversy over Emerson's assertion that "the soul knows no persons" nearly split the Unitarian movement permanently into two wings -- one liberal Christian, the other Transcendentalist -- and in many ways it was only the respect which both groups shared for their former professor that kept the two sides in dialog with one another.

Emerson sincerely believed that the principle theme of his Divinity School Address: that it was the task of the minister to acquaint men and women "firsthand with deity" -- was simply a restatement of Ware's own ideas about giving the heart a permanent bias toward God. What he failed to appreciate was how profoundly most Unitarians of the day were attached to the idea of a personal God. Even when they described God as a "spirit," (which they often did) they also clung to the metaphor of God as a loving parent, and of human beings as God's children. For Henry Ware Jr, the difference between faith in a personal God and a belief in some sort of Emersonian "Oversoul" was the difference between "the condition of a little child that lives in the presence of a judicious and devoted mother, an object of perpetual affection, and of another that is placed under the charge of a public institution, which knows nothing but a set of rules...." "[T]ake away the Father of the universe," he wrote, and "mankind becomes but a company of children in an orphan asylum." Our 19th century Unitarian forebearers argued about Emerson's "latest form of infidelity" for an entire generation. But in the end, it was their ability to lift up the things they agreed on, rather than stubbornly focusing on the points of disagreement, that allowed Unitarianism to move forward -- west from Northampton to exotic, faraway places like Meadville Ohio, and St Louis Missouri, and eventually even San Francisco California, all within that same generation.

I also find it interesting to note that 175 years later, here at the beginning of the 21st century, Ralph Waldo Emerson's name is a household word, while Henry Ware Jr. is all but forgotten except by a few historians like myself. The Second Church where they both preached is essentially out of business -- after a series of mergers and relocations, in 1972 it eventually merged one final time with Boston's original First Church to form the First and Second Church in Boston. In fact, of the three Unitarian Churches that occupied Boston's North End in Ware and Emerson's day, only one is even still standing -- the so-called "New North" church (also on Hanover Street) -- and it's beautiful Charles Bullfinch designed meeting house is now occupied by St. Stephen's Catholic Church, which is best remembered as the church where Rose Kennedy used to worship. (I did check to see whether the Archdiocese of Boston might be putting it up for sale, but apparently it's a keeper). And here in Carlisle, we still celebrate the Lord's Supper once a year -- on Maundy Thursday -- which I'm proud to say makes us one of the few remaining holdouts in the entire denomination.

But the larger point is this: times change, and unless churches learn to change with them, they eventually become irrelevant. But even as we learn to change with the times, we must also remember to hold on to the things that are truly important: things like our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the importance of giving our hearts a permanent bias toward God, and acquainting ourselves firsthand with Deity. Thank you all for coming out. And God bless us, every one.